


res publica, res privata

by thedevilchicken



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Jealousy, Kissing, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 09:51:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14102808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: When Hannibal puts his hands on him in public, Will knows it's for effect.





	res publica, res privata

**Author's Note:**

  * For [higuchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/higuchi/gifts).



Whenever Hannibal puts his hands on him in public, Will knows it's for effect. 

They let the people they meet believe they're married, because that's the founding fiction of this new life they've made at the opposite side of the Atlantic. They wear matching rings: they're gold bands and Hannibal called them simple and timeless and elegant when they first picked them out put them on, four months after their official date of death. They're simple and timeless and elegant, though the work Will does has worn more lines into his than he sees in Hannibal's. Hannibal takes his off to cook or tend the herbs he plants in the garden just outside their kitchen door; Will doesn't take his off when he's sanding paint from the hull of a boat or cleaning grease from a broken motor. He used to think that described their differing views on the life they share with a kind of eloquence: Hannibal wants to keep it seeming bright and new forever, but Will just wants to wear it in.

Whenever Hannibal puts his hands on him in public, it's always for effect, like the ghost of a palm at the small of his back as they wait in line at the butcher's shop, or fingertips brushing his knuckles on a local café's tabletop. It's primarily for other people's benefit, because it suits the contours of their story - like now, hand in hand on the platform as they wait for the train that will take them to London for the weekend. He used to believe effect was all it was, but Will knows better now than to believe that's all it is. He's almost sure it never was, though that realization didn't dawn until three months ago and frankly, life with Hannibal has never been any shade of certainty. 

They didn't sit together at the Alderleys' Christmas party, and that was the night Will understood. 

He considered switching the place cards when he realized how the names had been arranged, but in the end, when the ten invited guests had arrived in their smiles and winter coats and they all went in for dinner, he was at the opposite side and the opposite end of the table from Hannibal. They glanced at each other as Hannibal made conversation with their hostess, Carolyn Alderley, but Will looked away again, perversely irritated by it. Their host, Carolyn's husband Simon who was seated to Will's left, asked him how his latest project was progressing. Conversation moved on. Will tried to move along with it, but he was repeatedly drawn back. 

Their cover is a restoration and maintenance business - Will dealing with sailboats of various sizes and Hannibal with ageing keyboard instruments, since they require such a delicate touch. When Hannibal travels one weekend in every couple of months and leaves Will to fend for himself in their sleepy English seaside town, the business is his cover while he sets up for the two full days of black market surgeries that really pay their bills. But the restoration of old boats and instruments is how they met the Alderleys, three years ago now, and not thanks to Hannibal's other activities. 

Will volunteers his time to help restore the town's old pier that's been rotting away since just after the war. Hannibal sits on the local heritage committee and he plays the harpsichord for Carolyn Alderley's baroque chamber group, that meets in the studio above Will's workshop every Tuesday afternoon. She plays cello. She's not bad, Hannibal says, but she makes a show of settling the instrument between her knees sometimes when she doesn't know Will's looking and thinks Hannibal is. He's known all along exactly what it is she wants. He can tell she's used to getting her way and that her husband doesn't mind at all. But, this time, what she wants is his. 

Of course, their place cards that night called them Tomas and Simon Grey; Carolyn had no idea who she was talking to. The thought was almost comforting, though Will knew he should never have needed that comfort to begin with. 

He spoke with Carolyn's husband while he didn't look at Hannibal. Simon seemed to find some kind of kinship in their shared Christian name - Simon Alderley and Simon Grey - though Will hadn't experienced a genuinely Christian thought in years by that point and he definitely was not and is not called _Simon_. They'd spent afternoons sailing together while their spouses played Bach and he remembers thinking, even then, that he could've made worse choices in life than to sleep with him. After all, Simon's wife clearly wanted to sleep with his husband, and Simon clearly wanted to sleep with him. 

Will looked at him as they made pseudo-friendly conversation. Will examined him. He was closer to Hannibal's age than to Will's age, closer to Hannibal's height than to Will's height, and he even had a faint kind of accent that was, he'd told Will once, a souvenir of his childhood growing up with his mother's family in Switzerland instead of his father's there in England. Somehow he managed to look like Hannibal without really looking like Hannibal and it would have been easy. Will might even have liked it. But he'd known for a while by then that it wasn't Simon Alderley who interested him, so he nodded politely and he ate his elegant dinner from its elegant plate and he didn't look at Hannibal Lecter pretending his name was Tomas Grey. He pretended the bitter kind of jealousy he felt was Simon Grey's, not his, though Simon Grey's could never have felt so sharp or bitter. 

Later, after dinner, after coffee, after drinks, the guests began to leave. Some had early mornings looming and some had children to go home to - Simon and Tomas hadn't, but even now Will's known to say they had a daughter once who died in an accident overseas. He says she's the reason they moved - painful memories and recuperation, because the accident is how they explain away their most visible scars. Sometimes Will wonders what Abigail's name would have been, if they'd left together. Maybe one day he'll ask. 

They were the last guests still there but as Hannibal moved to retrieve his coat, he found himself with Carolyn underneath the mistletoe. She leaned in and she kissed him on the mouth, then she stepped away and laughed it off, but Will felt something in himself coil up tight and cold and angry. And when he headed for the door, intending to leave, Hannibal caught his arm and pulled him in, under the mistletoe where Carolyn had been just moments before. Before Will could object, Hannibal kissed him, casually, as if he'd done it a hundred times and not never before. Hannibal kissed him, like Tomas Grey would kiss his husband.

It was for the Alderleys' benefit, Will thought, to keep Simon and Carolyn at bay, and ordinarily Will might have been calm enough that he wouldn't have objected to it. But he didn't feel calm. He felt fucking incandescent. 

He remembers lifting one hand, the hand wearing his wedding ring, and threading his fingers into Hannibal's hair. He remembers taking a handful of the front of Hannibal's expensive shirt and holding onto it, tightly. He remembers meeting his eyes just for a second before he pressed his mouth to his. And he remembers that second kiss, the stupidity of it, the heat, the moment's pause before Hannibal reacted and they _kissed_ , hard and deep and slow, till Will's heart was hammering inside his chest. Then he pulled back. He said a curt goodnight, then he grabbed his coat and he walked straight out the door. 

It was cold outside, but nothing like Wolf Trap in the winter because the south coast of England never gets as cold as that, even with the wind blowing in off of the water. Their house has a sea view but it's the English Channel and not the Atlantic, and he walked away down the driveway to the lane that skirted the cliff edge to where Simon and Tomas lived. Will lost his wedding ring in the Atlantic the night they fell, the one he picked out with Molly - he doesn't ask if he pulled it off himself or if Hannibal did or if it was the ocean's fault, but these days he thinks he knows. To be here, there were things they necessarily had to leave behind. 

He could hear footsteps on the path behind him all the way home, but he didn't stop and he didn't turn back and Hannibal didn't call out though he gained on him thanks to Will's frustrating half-limp, a souvenir of that night that sometimes flares up in the cold. But then they were home, and they pushed inside and Hannibal closed the door as Will stood there in the dark. 

"Will," Hannibal said, his back to him as he twisted the key in the lock. Then he turned, and Will could see half of his face in moonlight, half in silhouette. Will almost wanted to hit him. He almost wanted to wrap his hands around his throat. 

"Should we kill her?" Hannibal asked. His face and his tone were both carefully neutral. 

"No," Will replied, and he didn't admit he'd been thinking about it. 

"Then what do you propose?"

"Divorce?"

Hannibal unwound the scarf from around his neck and he hung it on the rack behind the door. He unbuttoned his coat.

"That could be rather messy," he said, glancing at Will as he shrugged the coat from his shoulders, and he hung that up beside his scarf, each move he made measured and deliberate. 

"Messy?"

Hannibal turned to him. He looked at him. He came closer and Will watched him as he stood there, leaning back against the wall, till Hannibal raised his hands and pressed one to the paintwork either side of Will's shoulders. 

"Do you think I would let you go without a fight?" Hannibal asked. 

"No," Will replied. "I'm your favourite plaything." 

Hannibal leaned closer. He rested his forehead down lightly against Will's. He slipped one hand to Will's neck, his thumb at his cheekbone, rubbing like he might like to crush it. Depending on his mood, Will might have let him. 

"There was never a suggestion that we make ourselves brothers," Hannibal said. "Why do you think that is?"

"Your accent," Will replied. "Our ages. And the fact we look nothing alike."

"Then half brothers. Distant cousins. Friends."

Hannibal's fingers brushed down over the nape of Will's neck. Hannibal's thumb skimmed his throat. He moved, his cheek against Will's, his mouth by Will's ear.

"Why are we husbands, Will?" he asked. 

"Convenience." 

"Why do we sleep in the same bed at night?" he asked.

"Verisimilitude." 

"Why did you kiss me?"

"Because I didn't abandon my whole life to watch you flirt with Carolyn Alderley."

"Then you're jealous."

"Yes." 

"There's no need to be." Hannibal turned his head, his mouth by Will's neck. "Why did you kiss me, Will?"

"Because you kissed me first," Will replied. "Because there was mistletoe."

"If I'd known mistletoe would do the trick..." Hannibal's mouth brushed by the pulse under Will's jaw. 

Will pushed him back. He grabbed his shirt, he turned him, he shoved his back up to the wall. Will looked at him in the moonlight and Hannibal's face was so _alive_ ; he kissed him, because he couldn't think what else to do, and Hannibal tangled his fingers in Will's hair. He wrapped his free arm around Will's waist. He kissed him back. 

When they survived the fall, when they dragged themselves from the water, Hannibal laughed out loud and called it serendipity. All their wounds considered, it didn't feel serendipitous to Will. 

They stole the third truck they came to, not the first, though that meant stumbling farther in the dark. When they'd patched each other up to the extent they could in their condition, they left the veterinarian's office as clean as a whistle, not a fingerprint, not a single smudge of blood, though that took them time. They took ill-fitting clothes from a washing line and paid for the room in the rest stop motel with bills from Will's wallet, once they'd dried them in front of their stolen vehicle's heating vents. Hannibal checked their stitches and then they slept there, on the double bed, side by side. 

They spent two months after that cooped up together in the basement lab space of one of Hannibal's feckless old surgeon colleagues, driving each other stir crazy but safe in the knowledge that Dr. Stapleton's ego and greed far outweighed his fear of capture. Before they left, they cleaned themselves from the scene and Hannibal made his death look like a heart attack. And then they made their way to Europe: they passed through Portugal and Spain and France and all the way to England. Hannibal was right: when they planned their new identities, they were only ever married to each other. There was never any other suggestion.

"We never had a wedding night," Will said. 

Hannibal smiled. "We can remedy that," he replied. Will didn't doubt it for a second.

Now, when Hannibal puts his hands on him in public, it's with a singular sense of purpose. Standing at the station, he takes off one glove and he takes Will's hand, bare skin on skin, and there's a purpose there; it tells everyone who sees them what Tomas Grey feels about his husband. It tells Will, too, and that's what's important.

And later, in bed, when they take off their clothes, that will say something else, about Hannibal instead of Tomas. The scars that no one sees but them tell the story of exactly who they are. 

Hannibal squeezes his hand and Will smiles despite himself. The train arrives. They step on board. They take their seats together.

Will doesn't know if he made the right choice leaving with him, but he knows that it's not something he regrets.


End file.
